Fuzhou's 202 BC walls still mark Fujian's Banyan City capital
Fujian's capital sits between the Min estuary and Ningde in the Mindong cultural belt. Tradition dates the city to 202 BC, when King Wuzhu of Minyue raised a walled town called Ye. A ninth-century geography ties the later name Fuzhou to Mount Futo plus zhou, settlement—while locals still call it Rongcheng, the Banyan City.
Neolithic layers run deep: Xiying (about 7300–6500 BC) shows genetic links to Austronesian peoples, and Keqiutou (6500–5000 BC) holds Fujian's oldest known rice cultivation. After Yue's fall in 306 BC, Sima Qian says royal survivors fled south and joined local Yue to form Minyue. Qin created Minzhong Commandery in 221 BC, yet the coast stayed largely autonomous until Han forces annexed Minyue in 110 BC and reorganized Ye as a county in 85 BC.
Jin engineers dug East and West Lakes plus canals in 282, framing the later urban core. Tang prosperity brought temples and a formal renaming to Fuzhou in 725; Huang Chao's rebels seized much of the city in 879. Warlords Wang Chao and Wang Shenzhi took Fuzhou in 893 and proclaimed the Min Kingdom in 909. Under Song rule the city produced ten zhuangyuan exam champions, and the Hualin Temple of 964 ranks among China's oldest surviving wooden buildings. Marco Polo knew the place as Fugiu; Ming admiral Zheng He's fleets called seven times between 1405 and 1433.
Lin Zexu, a Fuzhou native, enforced Canton's opium ban in 1839; the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing opened Foochow as one of five treaty ports. Protestant missions arrived from 1846 and stayed into the 1950s. French Far East Fleet destroyed the Fujian Fleet at Mawei Harbor on 23 August 1884. The 2020 census counted 8,291,268 people in the prefecture, about 72 percent urban, and Brookings ranked the metro among the world's ten fastest-growing in 2015.
Source: Fuzhou
